Christopher Wray warns that pre-positioned malware could be triggered to disrupt critical systems in the U.S.
MUNICH—As intelligence chiefs and policymakers gathered for this city’s annual security conference focused on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation urged them not to lose sight of another threat: China.
Christopher Wray on Sunday said Beijing’s efforts to covertly plant offensive malware inside U.S. critical infrastructure networks is now at “a scale greater than we’d seen before,” an issue he has deemed a defining national security threat.
Citing Volt Typhoon, the name given to the Chinese hacking network that was revealed last year to be lying dormant inside U.S. critical infrastructure, Wray said Beijing-backed actors were pre-positioning malware that could be triggered at any moment to disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure.
“It’s the tip of the iceberg…it’s one of many such efforts by the Chinese,” he said on the sidelines of the security conference that has been dominated by questions over Ukraine and the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. China, he had earlier told delegates, is increasingly inserting “offensive weapons within our critical infrastructure poised to attack whenever Beijing decides the time is right.”
The FBI chief declined to elaborate on what other critical infrastructure had been targeted, stressing that the Bureau had “a lot of work under way.”